Thursday, 5 November 2015

Passport's Jochen Schmidt's New York Evenings from 1986

This gentleman was in Passport and is not the same as the ST marimba player Jochen Schmidt in the German Naima (aka Naima New Jazz Quartet), as seen here. (Note that this too is different from the (slightly superior to my mind) Czech Naima, supposed to be spelled with an umlaut, mistakenly left off by myself here.) No, this highly regarded composer, who wrote all tracks here, became a film composer subsequently, after a career in Klaus Doldinger's Passport.

Profile:Real Name: Jochen Schmidt-HambrockBorn 21. Februar 1955 in Wuppertal, Germany. Composer of jingles and film scores. Member and bass player of the jazz fusion band Passport (2) from 1989 to 1995. He was founding and from 1987 to 2010 board member of German professional composers association "Composers Club". Since 2011 he is vice president of the German Film Composers Union DEFKOM (Deutsche Filmkomponistenunion).
His contacts helped him on this release, with an astonishing number of luminary jazz musicians including Charlie Mariano, Rainer Bruninghaus (keyboardist for the magnificent prog band Eiliff), Mike Herting (whose Brazil album I featured before) and Manfred Schoof, all of whose albums I can recommend hearing.

As a taste of the very spacey, late-ecmish sound these guys get going with tons of orbiting clouds of synthesized proto-galactic dust consider the Bruninghaus-like track Spheres:

Or simply, relish the enviable and truly topmost skills he demonstrates as a film composer on the track called Raindrops: